The invention described herein was made in the performance of official duties by a employees of the Department of the Navy and may be manufactured, used, licensed by or for the Government for any governmental purpose without payment of any royalties thereon.
This patent application is co-pending with one related patent application entitled xe2x80x9cCONTAINER-BASED PRODUCT DISPENSING SYSTEMxe2x80x9d (Navy Case No. 83654) by the same inventors as this patent application.
The invention relates generally to product dispensing systems, and more particularly to an unmanned system that generates and disperses printed materials in a controlled fashion.
Currently, xe2x80x9cproductsxe2x80x9d such as leaflets, food packets, sand bags, supplies and other materials that must be air dropped or air-delivered for military or civilian (e.g., disaster relief, emergency response, etc.) purposes are generated or manufactured, packaged, handled, transported to airfields, loaded into aircraft, flown to the area of interest and then dropped from the aircraft over the area of interest. Alternatively, the products are delivered to airfields for truck or other manual distribution. In either case, a substantial amount of handling and transfer operations are typically required thereby making the process time consuming and expensive. Further, in terms of dispersal of pre-printed materials such as leaflets, rapidly changing situations may obsolete information in the pre-printed materials before they are even dispersed over a geographic area.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide an efficient product dispensing:system that can be used to both generate and disperse printed materials in real time.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a printed materials generation/dispersal system that can be used to generate and disperse printed materials in the air from an aircraft.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide an unmanned printed material generation/dispersal system that can carry out its operation in accordance with a scheme that is pre-programmed in the system or is remotely-transmitted to the system.
Other objects and advantages of the present invention will become more obvious hereinafter in the specification and drawings.
In accordance with the present invention, an unmanned system is provided for the real time generation and dispersement of printed materials. A standardized shipping container houses at least one printing module capable of generating printed materials. A controller module is mounted in the shipping container and is coupled to the printing module to control the generation of the printed materials and monitor status of the printing module. A communications module is also mounted in the shipping container and is coupled to the controller module for communicating with the printing module (via the controller module) and for transmitting the status to a remote location. A dispenser is coupled to the printing module for receiving the printed materials so-generated and for expelling the printed materials from the shipping container.